Dreamhost (the host I’m using to play around with Ruby on Rails) doesn’t support multiple production environments (out of the box anyway), but I’ve sort of found a solution. When I registered with DH, I got my one free domain–after racking my brain for days, I finally settled on one that I wasn’t super thrilled with…but good enough. About a week after registration, I of course came up with a much better name.

After registering the second domain, I started working on setting up a subversion repository. Being somewhat new with Unix, SVN, and Rails… it’s taken me a couple of days (well, a couple of hours each day for a couple of days) to get everything configured properly. I’ve now got domain #1 working as the development environment, domain #2 working in production mode, the databases set up for both, and both directories acting as a Working Copy. The rough plan is to make all my changes to the Dev environment, commit the changes, then–when satisfied–just roll over to the production side and run an update. It’s a pretty simple usage of Subversion…but hey, I’m the only developer.

All the databases and pages are purely temporary while I play around with rails before starting actual production, so unfortunately I’ll probably have to delete all this stuff and start over from scratch later. I haven’t read up on Capistrano at all, but I might investigate it before wiping everything. Progress on personal projects gets a little slow once you join the real world!